Episode: 5.8, Designated Target
Air Date: November 13, 2007.
The Victim: Admiral Kenneth Kirkland, USN.
Emotionally Traumatized, But Ultimately Irrelevant, Witness Who Finds the Body: A taxi is driving a Navy Admiral, Admiral Kirkland, through the park. Admiral Kirkland is carrying a briefcase with a folder labeled top secret inside. Two guys on a motorcycle ride up beside the cab. The one in back shoots the cab driver and then Admiral Kirkland with a silenced pistol. The cab crashes. The guys on the motorcycle, their faces shielded by helmets, pull both men out of the cab, but seem to ignore the briefcase. One of them picks up a wallet and takes something out of it. Then they tap the driver and the admiral one apiece to the head to make sure they’re dead.
Plot Recap: Ziva arrives at work and seems to be breaking up with someone on the phone. Emphasis on “seems to be.” Tony grabs the phone, pretends to be Ziva’s husband, threatens the person on the other end and hangs up. But…it was Ziva’s aunt in Tel Aviv and she had called Ziva for advice on breaking up with her mahjong partner. Ooops. Tony asks where to send flowers but Ziva makes clear that if Tony communicates with her aunt again, Ziva will kill him.
McGee arrives in a good mood. Tony thinks he had sex. With a girl! But McGee denies it. He met a nice girl for coffee. They’re hitting it off. She lives across the hall from him. Tony is excited but one head slap from an arriving Gibbs later and he’s more focused on their next case.
At the park, the team determines the attack on the cab was not a robbery. McGee picks up the wallet the motorcycle assassins went through and we see it belongs to the cab driver. Ziva finds the motorcycle tracks and goes to look for the murder weapons in case the assassins discarded them. Ducky states the obvious that the COD is any of several gunshot wounds. There’s a digital surveillance camera in the cab that should indicate TOD. McGee plugs the camera up to his phone and the team watches the attack. Gibbs tells Tony to find out everything about the Admiral.
Gibbs finds lipstick on McGee’s collar, and congratulates him. But then tells him to never get married. As Gibbs leaves, McGee gets a call about a sofa he didn’t order. We hear him say, “Yeah that’s my credit card number” as he walks off.
Back at the squad room, Tony reports that Admiral Kirkland is known for various efficiency projects- rapid deployment, that sort of thing. He was on his way to a budget meeting at the time of his murder, but his car broke down, so he took a cab. A three-car pile-up on Connecticut Ave. took them through the park. There’s nothing missing from Admiral Kirkland’s briefcase, no evidence of sabotage of the original vehicle, no enemies, loving family, no large insurance policies…
No motive.
Abby is still trying to quit caffeine. She breaks down the ballistics for Gibbs. The shooter used .9mm slugs. One is a standard hollow point, and we’re looking for a Glock or a Beretta. Gibbs asks about the motorcycle. Abby has traced it as a Yamaha R6 series. There’s no sale record so it may have been purchased in another country and ridden across the border. There’s no indication whether the bikers followed the taxi on its detour or hacked its nav system to track it.
McGee is looking at whether the cab was hacked. But there’s no way to tell who, regardless. Gibbs is starting to get frustrated and tells the team to look into the cab company.
McGee gets a call and tells his new girl he can’t talk. Tony yells that he can talk. We get from McGee’s end of the conversation that this new girl neighbor opened his mail, got his credit card number, and bought a sofa. Intrigued, the other agents inch forward to listen. McGee tells the girl they’ll talk later.
Ducky walks Gibbs through the shooting. It’s all as we saw. But Ducky has found a missing tooth, extracted post-mortem from the cab driver. It’s not in his stomach and it wasn’t at the crime scene. Nothing was taken from the Admiral. Ducky also found on the driver’s right hand invisible fingerprint salve, meaning our assassins printed him at the scene. And since teeth, fingerprints and DNA are the ways to ID a body, it seems clear that the cab driver was the target, not the Admiral.
Our dead driver is Atif Nukunda, who immigrated from Burundi in East Africa seven years ago after his name was found on a death squad list. So, he was a political refugee. Gibbs sends Ziva and Tony to check out the cab company that dispatched Nukunda. McGee has tracked the cell phone communication from the park at the time of the death and one call was high density, meaning video transmission. Proof of death, Gibbs thinks. It was made by a pre-paid cell phone to somewhere in East Africa.
Tony and Ziva interview Bayliss, the cab dispatcher. He displays ignorance as to both the murder and the fact that Nukunda was likely living in his cab. Tony calls him out for lying and says he worked transit detail in Baltimore and knows a lie when he hears one. The cab manager admits Nukunda was a gypsy cab driver, meaning he worked off book for himself and not just the cab company. This requires an illegal license. Per Tony, it’s also a good way to take advantage of desperate for work immigrants. The dispatcher says he doesn’t know anything about Nukunda and can’t help. Tony knows that dispatchers in fact know everything about the drivers and gets on the mic and begins loudly threatening to bring the authorities in to check everyone’s license. Ziva is surprised. The dispatcher is not amused and tells Tony that the Burundian drivers hang out at a specific café, and gives Tony the address. On the way out, Tony gives Ziva hell about her English and not understanding the phrase “gypsy” in relation to cab drivers.
Back at the lab, Abby is technobabbling to Gibbs. But, by treating the wallet with some chemical or other, she is able to determine that the assassins took Nukunda’s family photo from his wallet. More proof of death. She also found some oil from the motorcycle. She can place the bike at the murder scene if the team finds it. Then she presents Gibbs with a cup of decaf coffee as a gift and tells him that she sleeps at night and actually eats food and he should try it too. He throws it in the trash.
Tony and Ziva visit the café identified by Bayliss. The patrons were all having a good time there too…until a couple of feds walked in. Tony shows his ID and addresses the entire place, while flashing Nukunda’s picture. Tony begins making work visa threats at cab drivers. A man in a suit gets up from a booth and walks over to look at the photograph. The man, named Abaka, says he knows Nukunda, but the dead man’s real name is not Nukunda.
Ziva and Tony sit down for tea with Abaka, who is a professor at NCIS-universe fictional college Waverly University (See Red Cell, Episode 2.20). He has been in the county seven years, the same amount of time as Nukunda. If Nukunda’s family is in hiding, it’s for a good reason, and Abaka doesn’t know Nukunda’s real name because secrets keep folks alive. Tony considers this evasive and threatens jail. When Abaka, the African-failed-state torture veteran says American prisons do not cause him fear, Tony goes to deportation. Ziva thinks Tony needs to dial it back. Abaka says he’ll check around, but he’s not optimistic that his people will cooperate with U.S. feds.
As they leave, Ziva thinks Abaka is holding something back. Tony thinks they all looked suspicious but wonders how Ziva could understand Abaka since he spoke perfect English. Ziva gets in Tony’s face and calls him xenophobic. Tony turns it into a joke about Xena: Warrior Princess. The fight is broken up when the agents notice Abaka in their rear-view mirror, engaged in a heated telephone conversation.
McGee traces the Abaka call. McGee is so focused that Tony likens him to a Romanian orphan who can’t stop rocking. Ziva tells Tony he is prejudiced. Tony denies it. But then mocks her English again in the very next sentence.
McGee finds what he’s looking for. Abaka called a hotel room currently occupied by a Sayda Zuri. McGee accesses immigration files. She came from East Africa on a restricted travel visa two days previous. Gibbs tells Tony to go pick her up, but that’s not necessary as she comes strolling into the squad room. The woman says she has come to claim her husband’s body.
In a conference room, Ziva interviews Mrs. Zuri, who says her husband was named Thomas Zuri. Thomas came from Burundi seven years previous, but Mrs. Zuri has never been to the U.S. because she has not been free to come before now. And now it’s too late. Mrs. Zuri admits that Abaka told her to come to NCIS. She says that she and Thomas were soulmates and asks Ziva if she has met her soulmate. Ziva sort of ignores the question and Mrs. Zuri grabs her arm and says, “You will know the minute you do.”
Gibbs arrives to escort Mrs. Zuri to autopsy. She says that the man on the table is not Thomas Zuri. Mrs. Zuri looks at the full body and says Thomas was tortured and the dead man has no scars.
Meanwhile, McGee is still having trouble with his crazy neighbor. Gibbs arrival prevents him from addressing it, though. As veteran watchers of this show know, members of the team are not allowed to attend to personal problems while cases are ongoing. Ziva reports 11 attacks on cab drivers in the last 60 days. There are three others who were shot with .9mm slugs and had a tooth missing. Gibbs wants images of all three victims and Nukunda put up on the screen. They are all similar enough in appearance that it’s clear the bad guys don’t know exactly who they are looking for.
In the conference room, Mrs. Zuri gives Director Shepard background on her husband. Mrs. Zuri says Thomas was a storekeeper in Burundi who had no interest in politics. But his words were stirring and they spread. He became a symbol of freedom and resistance to Burundians. So much that he had to get the hell out of Dodge seven years prior. Still, things have changed in Burundi, and the resistance has grown stronger and many hope Thomas will return and lead a new government. Thomas’s enemies fear he will do that, hence the efforts to assassinate him.
Thomas is pro-American, which is why the extremists hate him. It’s also why the U.S. smuggled him out. Mrs. Zuri couldn’t leave her ailing father and Thomas figured if he was no longer a focal point for extremist rage, she would be left alone. That ended up being the case, but Thomas eventually wrote Mrs. Zuri a note, smuggled in by the American embassy, that said he was working as a cab driver in DC and wanted her to join him. Another civil war broke out in Burundi. Mrs. Zuri received no more letters, and the U.S. Embassy could no longer help her. And now the extremists have come to the U.S. for her husband. Shepard asks for the name of the U.S. Embassy official who helped her husband escape.
That guy’s name turns out to be Derrick Choyce, and he seems unenthused about being hauled down to NCIS to speak with Shepard. He also pleads ignorance and tries to leave. Gibbs tells him to sit his ass down. Choyce is in the private sector now, working for an oil company, and Shepard seems to think his economic value would decrease if she let slip to the public that Choyce refused to help solve the murder of a U.S. Naval admiral. Choyce says, off the record, that Thomas walked away form State. He left the program five years ago after providing two years of helpful intel. And that was the end of the U.S. government’s relationship with Thomas Zuri. Shepard asks where to find Thomas, but Choyce doesn’t know. Choyce thinks it’s a violation of the agreement the Embassy had with Thomas to reveal anything, but after some light intimidation by Gibbs he coughs up an address from five years previous.
In the squad room, McGee’s girl is laughing over the phone at his seeming inability to do something as simple as cancel a credit card, stop payments, and send her ass to jail. Gibbs catches him talking to her and McGee hangs up. Gibbs asks McGee, in so many words (one of them is “visit”) to hack the State Department’s Strategic Analysis Unit. Gibbs wants to know about oil in Burundi. And he also wants McGee to run Thomas’s last know address.
Ziva finds Tony fighting with a vending machine. She gives him change. And then asks him why he doesn’t like immigrants. Tony thinks that’s ridiculous. Then he says he is an immigrant, granted a few generations back and compares that to Ziva showing up with her weekend fun pass visa. He talks about his great grandparents starting a trucking company and says not to tell him about the immigrant experience until she becomes one. Ziva smirks and asks if any of his rags-to-riches story is true. Tony responds, “Parts,” and asks if anything is stuck in his teeth. “Nothing sticks to you,” Ziva says. Then she leans next to him on the vending machine and asks if he ever thinks about soulmates. Tony pretends she’s asking him about a 70s song and tells her, “Sing a few bars. I’ll get it.” “You’ll never get it,” she says and walks off.
McGee looked for oil in Burundi and found satellite recon photos of a Chinese-owned company doing oil exploration in the country. They’ve expended tons of resources in the search and have a consultant who still has his State Department clearance: Choyce. McGee also ran the address for Thomas and the building has been knocked down.
Tony and Ziva arrive and report backgrounding the other cab driver victims. They have nothing in common, and all were killed at different times of the day. But all were killed when taking fares off the books, and all after the rides called for a cab rather than hailing one. Which means Bayliss, the dispatcher looks like a good suspect. And sure enough, he was working during all four of the attacks. Ziva calls the cab company and Bayliss also did not report to work. McGee has his address, so the agents take off.
They converge on Bayliss’s apartment. Gibbs even claims they have a warrant when he announces, but Tony does not wait Agent Lee’s prescribed fifteen seconds after announcement before kicking in the door. No one is home. But Gibbs sees signs that a bookcase was moved. The boys move it and recover a lockbox and Ziva picks the lock. By kicking it. It contains money- kickbacks, seemingly. It also contains fake cab IDs. Good fakes according to Tony. He calls Bayliss a “Coyote” and McGee explains to Ziva that a coyote is someone who takes advantage of illegal immigrants. “As opposed to outsourcing. Which is what you are,” Tony tells Ziva.
At that moment, a shell casing falls to the ground, and then Bayliss’s body falls through the ceiling, out of attic space. He has a bullet hole in his head, but he’s still warm, so it’s a recent kill. Gibbs looks out the window and sees a motorcycle carrying two roar off down the street.
After a commercial break, McGee says that the assassins slipped through Metro’s cordon. Gibbs tells Tony to bring Choyce in. And he wants to know who Choyce called after he left NCIS. Gibbs tells Ziva to get Mrs. Zuri.
Back at HQ, McGee gets a call and he’s in an awkward situation because he just wants to cancel his credit cards without giving out the girl’s name. And credit card companies want to be able to charge people who commit fraud. Abby arrives at his desk to chat. McGee tells her about the girl who stole his mail and took out $65k in pre-approved credit cards in his name. McGee has really good credit. And…what the hell? McGee’s girl is a billionaire heiress who enjoys stealing from people and prefers to get arrested for it. She has already written McGee a check for $65k. Only, instead of being turned off by this batshit loon, McGee is “nuts” for her. Abby says to throw her in the brig. Abby says she loves McGee and that is enough. If you like never having sex with the people who love you, I suppose.
Shepard has Choyce in the interrogation room. Shepard shows him his banking records, secured by warrant, which demonstrate payments to Choyce from Burundi extremists. Choyce wants a deal. Shepard says, truth first. Choyce admits to selling the extremists information, but it was old information. Thomas changed addresses all the time and quit driving a cab, so there’s no way the extremists could have found him. Except Thomas didn’t quite driving a cab. He went gypsy, off the books. Worse, Choyce gave the extremists Bayliss’s name and now Bayliss is dead. But likely not before Bayliss told the perps where to find Thomas. Choyce says the extremists communicated with him via burn phones and it’s not traceable. Gibbs asks for names. Choyce balks. Gibbs plays his favorite card and tells Shepard to tie Choyce to Burundi terrorism and send him to Gitmo, no lawyer, no phone calls. Choyce caves as they all do, and fingers Abaka.
McGee says Abaka is off the grid. So, the team turns to trying to locate Thomas. You need a fingerprint to get a cab license, so McGee thinks he can track Thomas through the DMV if he gets the print. Ziva suggests Mrs. Zuri’s locket might be a good place for a print.
Abby runs the picture from inside the locket. She gets a partial. But the partial isn’t in the DC, Virginia or Maryland areas. Gibbs says to expand the search. While she waits, Abby starts to nod off, so Gibbs gives her his coffee. He also thinks she just solved the case. Huh?
Gibbs returns to the squad room. He tells McGee to check Bayliss’s laptop for any drivers who aren’t running a meter and who haven’t reported for 72 hours. Because Thomas would have stopped driving once he heard about the assassinations. After correcting for demographic data, McGee narrows it to five drivers. He puts them on screen and Gibbs asks Mrs. Zuri to make an ID. She does. Mrs. Zuri begs to come with the team to Thomas’s listed address. Ziva backs her play so Gibbs allows it.
At the address, Ziva has found a motorcycle nearby. The team stealthily approaches the house, weapons at the ready. The assassins have Thomas cornered in back and they are trying to record his death. One of them is Abaka. Thomas says they can kill him, but to please leave his wife alone.
Gibbs yells for the perps to drop their weapons. And gets shot at for his trouble. Tony takes out one perp, and then he and Ziva wing Abaka. Ziva smilingly arrests Abaka as he lays on the ground.
Gibbs greets Thomas and tells him he’s a hard man to find. Maybe not hard enough, Thomas suggests. He asks after his wife.
A car pulls up and Mrs. Zuri gets out. Ziva tells her seven years is a long time, but Mrs. Zuri moves toward Thomas. They have a reunion. Of a sort. He seems more confused than happy to see her. Thomas wrote her hundreds of letters. She says she got one. Then he heard the army slaughtered everyone. Turns out she survived. Great news, right?
And then dude’s new wife walks out the front door. Thomas says, “I thought I would never see you again.” And then a little girl walks out too. He apologizes. And then apologizes again. Mrs. Zuri says it’s alright and that she understands and she’s just glad he is safe. Then she turns to go, and Thomas whispers her name after her. Gibbs has a look on his face that either says, “Well, didn’t see that coming,” or “See? Don’t get married,” or “I need to stop by Lowe’s to get some lumber on the way home,” but it’s hard to tell which. Ziva looks disillusioned. Thomas whispers his first wife’s name again. Ziva puts Mrs. Zuri in the car. Then she turns and watches Thomas pick up his daughter and walk back into his house. Tony walks over. He and Ziva share a meaningful glance, but Tony keeps walking.
And that’s our show.
Quotables:
(1) Ziva [on the phone]: No, no, no, it’s not you, it’s just… well, you know, these things run their course and… well, you, you must accept that…
Tony: Personal call, David?
Ziva: Yes. Go away.
Tony: Somebody being dumped?
Ziva [covers mouthpiece]: How do you tell someone you no longer want to see them?
Tony: Easy. [Takes phone] Listen, Dirtbag, this is Ziva’s husband. I have your phone number now. I can find your address. If you ever try to contact her again, I will reach down your throat, grab your intestines, rip them out and drive over your head. Lose this number or lose your life. [Hangs up]. You’re welcome.
Ziva: That was my Aunt Nettie from Tel Aviv. She was trying to stop seeing her 86-year-old mahjong partner.
Tony: Why didn’t you stop me?
Ziva: Too stunned.
Tony: Where do I send flowers?
Ziva: If you communicate with her again, I will kill you.
(2) Tony: How long have you been in this country?
Ziva: Why?
Tony: Well, you’ve never heard of gypsy cabs, you don’t use contractions. Assimilate already.
Ziva: What are contraptions?
(3)“Love is never having to read her Miranda rights.” -Abby, summarizing McGee’s relationship with the crazy heiress girl.
Ziva-propisms: Ziva doesn’t understand a colloquial use of the word “gypsy.” She doesn’t know what “contractions” means and asks, “contraptions?”
Tony Awards: Tony references Bonnie and Clyde (1967), makes a comparison between Taxi the television show and Taxi Driver (1976). He mentions Xena: Warrior Princess.
Abby Road: It is 365 steps from Abby’s lab to McGee’s desk. Truly, this is the Abby Road.
McNicknames: Probie.
Ducky Tales: Ducky keeps to himself.
The Rest of the Story:
-Tony gets slapped in the head. He just saved Gibbs’s life last episode, so that’s gratitude for you. Requiem, Episode 5.7.
-McGee last had his identity stolen in Switch, Episode 3.5.
-Abby has been trying to quit caffeine since In the Dark, Episode 4.22, but had at least one setback in Family, Episode 5.2.
-Ziva will eventually take Tony’s remarks about becoming an immigrant to heart. But that’s the future.
Casting Call: Thomas was played by Jonathan Adams, who has done a ton of super-hero cartoon voice work and has depicted such characters as Ronan the Accuser, Darkseid, and the Martian Manhunter.
Man, This Show Is Old: Tony struggles to get the vending machine to take his beat-up old dollar.
The immigration debate on this episode, such as it is, seems positively quaint in the Age of Trump.
MVP: Tony got a kill.
Rating: This episode was saved by the ending. It wasn’t bad in terms of the mystery, but it was a little preachy. And it was thematically disjointed. There was all this stuff about soulmates, but also a theme on the value of the immirant experience. And the show went out of its way to make Tony an asshole in order to make a point that isn’t even entirely clear, or at least blandly generic.
But the final scene, where a man who thought he lost his wife finds her again, but only after re-marrying and having a child with his new wife, is awful to behold. It’s also great TV. Seven Palmers.
Next Time: Yet another precocious child whose dad is in trouble. This makes something like four.
A Year of NCIS 